Bernini’s Baldacchino

What could be more fun on a Friday than stories about travel and tawdry Popes? How about the Baroque-era Vatican in 17th-century Rome and a pope from the ridiculously wealthy Italian family, who went to war for Papal territory and drove the apostolic see into great debt?

Pictured here is the Baldacchino, the enormous canopy sculpted by the artist Bernini between 1623-1634. It is truly monumental, a structure sixty-six feet high inside the gargantuan space of the Vatican, directly over the high altar of St. Peter’s. Look at the way it dwarfs the ecclesiatics saying mass below.

Pope Urban VIII commissioned the structure from Bernini, who arranged to have Urban’s Barberini family coat-of-arms depicted on eight panels on the plinths supporting the four twisting columns. You can see one of them on the second picture. Notice the bees on the shield, representing chastity because back in the day some folks thought bees reproduced without having sex. Turns out they were wrong about the queens.

But if you look at the top and bottom of the shield, you can make out a woman’s head and a Cthulhu sort of face at the top and bottom, respectively. Turns out there are eight different faces and eight different “grotesques” (the art history term) for each panel. These have hidden meanings.

All scholars agree that the women’s faces represent a person in labor giving birth — I posted a few in the third picture. But art historians disagree about whether the labor represents something spiritual about the birth of the earthly Church or Bernini taking revenge on the pope for disavowing Urban’s nephew’s son.

The fourth image is the most interesting IMHO. These are made up of faces that melt and merge into folds. While the faces start out as satyrs, it’s hard to say what they eventually change into. While art historian Carol M. Richardson believes they represent a woman’s uterus, other art historians have argued they represented labial folds around the genitalia.